The Problem With Antisemitism On College Campuses Stems From Where Jews And Arabs Focused Their Donations

A number of high-level individuals have recently taken aim at their alma maters for the toxic environment that exists for Jewish and Zionist students on campus.

They are very late to the party.

Jewish Philanthropists Donating To Humanities

For many years, billionaires like Ron Perelman, Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan donated tens of millions of dollars for health care facilities, art centers, humanities and economic studies at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and others. Yet they seldom put any money into Israel or Jewish Studies programs at these institutions, assuming all was fine and the schools they attended decades earlier remained much the same.

Now, as noxious antisemitism has reached a boiling point as campuses host “Resistance” rallies in support of Palestinians slaughtering Jewish civilians, these philanthropists have suddenly recalled the Jewish and Zionist part of their humanity programs.

Marc Rowan called on alumni to stop donating to the University of Pennsylvania after the school hosted an anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic “literary festival.” He said that the heads of the university should step down for failing to stop the tidal wave of hatred at his beloved school.

Bill Ackman asked Harvard to publish the names of people who said they supported Hamas’s actions of “resistance,” so that financial firms would not hire them upon graduation.

These billionaires, who made fortunes in the business world by investing intelligently and properly predicting the future, utterly failed to understand universities today.

Billions from Muslim Countries For Muslim Studies

The Saudi Arabian government, corporations and particular individuals gave $600 million to several universities between 2011 and 2017 according to The Project On Government Oversight. MIT alone took in $78 million. George Washington University, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Southern California each took $1 million or more.

According to POGO, “the largest foreign funder by far is Qatar, the only country to give over $1 billion in the seven years covered by the Higher Education Act data.” Qatar is a principal funder of the political-terrorist group Hamas which committed the heinous massacre of over 1,000 people in Israel this week, which finally made the Jewish billionaires pay attention to the campus problem.

POGO added that “Harvard University received by far the most foreign money in the period, reporting just over $1 billion from over 60 countries. In addition to Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Northwestern University are among the schools that reported receiving the most foreign gifts, each totaling over $300 million.”

Harvard students after Hamas’s jihadi massacre

The foreign donations take several forms, each of which embeds foreign culture into the universities’ campuses, and ultimately into the country.

Some international money was used to establish university branches in foreign countries. These centers enable U.S. students to study abroad and become more familiar with autocratic regimes in a friendly college environment.

Arab states funded Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern studies departments on U.S. campuses like the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who donated $2.5 million to the Harvard Divinity School to endow the Sheik Zayed Al Nahyan Professorship in Islamic Religious Studies. Within a short period of time, the Zayed Center became a noxious fountain of anti-Semitic screed complete with Holocaust denials and blood libels.

Significantly, millions of dollars from Arab countries have funded student scholarships for thousands of Muslim students to come to the U.S. to study. During the Obama Administration, tens of thousands of students from Arab countries were present at universities, a number which began to decline significantly under the Trump Administration.

The presence of thousands of foreign students and Muslim teachers taking over Middle Eastern Studies Departments created a toxic brew. Students were able to petition universities to open chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with a faculty adviser, which were conveniently now present and paid for. The AMCHA Initiative showed that schools with five or more academic advisers favoring boycotting Israel “were 7.24 times more likely” to issue anti-Israel statements than schools with fewer than five advisors. Further, AMCHA Reports “analyzing antisemitic incidents in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 indicate a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.”

In short, Gulf states spent billions of dollars over decades at American universities building an anti-Zionist and antisemitic infrastructure, while Jewish philanthropists had ribbon cutting ceremonies on general intellectual matters. The Jewish billionaires are waking up too late to their poor investments, when the anti-Zionist and antisemitic culture on campuses is deeply ingrained and universities are highly addicted to the stable flow of Islamic money.

While Rowan and Ackman may make a lot of noise about getting alumni to stop donating to these schools, they should put at least as much effort to get universities to stop taking money from autocratic, anti-democratic regimes which are poisoning the minds of America’s future and making schools inhospitable for Jews.

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